Robert Edison Sandiford

West Indians on a Frozen Landscape

Eyeing the North Star: Directions in African-Canadian Literature Edited by George Elliott Clarke (McClelland & Stewart Inc., 268 pp., $19.99, paperback)

"I did not discover African-Canadian literature until I was nineteen, when I took up Harold Head's anthology, Canada In Us Now (1976), and, especially, Gloria Wesley-Daye's chapbook, To My Someday Child (1975)," confesses George Elliott Clarke in the Preface to his new anthology, Eyeing the North Star: Directions in African-Canadian Literature." And with this discovery, "the King James scriptures melded with East Coast spirituals, New Orleans jazz, Bajan calypso, and nigerian jit-jive."

A professor of Canadian and African-American Literature at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, Clarke is the editor of Fire on the Water: An Anthology of Black Nova Scotian Writers (1991-1992) and the author of three volumes of poetry, including the astonishing Whylah Falls (1990). As he demonstrates with thisanthology,oneofblackCanadianliterature's most attractive attributes is its inclusiveness. Many of the writers he has chosen are either West Indian (Gerard Etienne, Claire Harris, Olive Senior) or of West Indian descent (Suzette Mayr). Two are from Africa (David N. Odhiambo and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza).

The literature takes in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa - their histories, cultures, music, and mythologies. So the voice of black folk is polyphonous. Clarke's penchant for punctuating his English with French may be a bit precious. Nevertheless, it illustrates how one language can depend on another for movement, for rhythm, for life.

Most, if not all, of these writers are multilingual. This is why to describe Frederick Ward's English as "Faulknerian," as Clarke does, though a high compliment, is somewhat beside the point. Ward's work and that of his colleagues is in a class of its own: they write in the dialect of their people, or in standard English or French, yet with a Canadian lilt. In fact, the use of dialect, which can be off-putting to some, brings home this reality. If poorly executed, it can result in the caricature of a character. In Eyeing the North Star, it authenticates experience.

Yet Clarke is wise to point out that, unlike their black American counterparts, "Race, per se, is not everything for African Canadians. No, it is the struggle against erasure that is everything." The politics of the women writers, for instance, are more personal, largely because their options have been narrower than those of their male counterparts. Althea Prince, M. Nourbese Philip, Makeda Silvera - they have had to deal with racism and sexism not only from white people but from black people as well. Their thoughts and feelings on these and other concerns are often closer to the surface of their writing. This isn't to say their work lacks depth, rather that it sounds different ones.

With Eyeing the North Star, Clarke sets out to do two things: first, to defy readers' expectations and, second, to broaden the scope of black Canadian literature. He admits: "I prefer the eccentric, the perverse, the Gothic attitude that Canada inspires in many artists." Therefore, Austin Clarke's "more imaginative work" is favoured. "When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks" is lyrical, experimental and surreal. It is also allusive: the language is strange, that of the mind more than intellectual. The portrait of an artist as a hungry young man, it is the story of a difficult relationship between a man and a woman. Mention of Yonge and Bloor streets ornament the text, and other places in and around Toronto are evoked. Still, the story, though vintage, is not typical of the Barbadianborn author's work.

Andre Alexis' "Despair: Five Stories of Ottawa" is anotherpurposely exotic choice. It is populated by ghosts, propelled by bizarre occurrences and coincidences. These are dark fairy tales. To a certain extent, they seem weird for their own sake, wrapped up in their own singularities. Only in the third story does a moral (about there being no quick fixes to humanity's problems and never trusting politicians) come undone. Actually, all of the stories are cautionary: the common advisory is that if something appears too good to be true, it usually is. Highly stylized allegories, they read as if dashed off in a brilliant flurry.

But the quality and diversity of the anthology are rich. Just as strong an impulse as the Gothic is the romantic. In his poem "Ah My Love Flutters....," Etienne asks the essential:

Of what use is love if it is not for loving

Of what use is love
if it is not for watering sorrow and grief

Of what use is love
if it is not for making heart-stalks bloom

Of what use is love
if it is not to join a great coumbite
of reunited days and nights

Etienne's work is adventurous and sensuous but always like that of fellow expatriot Dany Laferri6re: deeply about Haiti and the nature of political oppression, which leads to all other forms of oppression. As with the Gothic, 'romance has its limits. In this particular anthology, that turns out to be sentimentality. Brand's perception of Caribbean critical appreciation as "belonging to another intellectual cosmos" is fair, but there's more than just the rejection of "American romanticism" in the movie crowds' laughing and jeering in her story "Hard Against the Soul" - there is an inability to confront what is foreign in a measured manner. Her view of life in the Caribbean is a touch myopic: "here at least there is the simple, simple assumption of goodwill."

Cecil Foster also succumbs to this "simple assumption" in his writing. In "The Rum," he gives an assessment of Canadians that is far too harsh and one of Barbadians that is far too nostalgic. (Given the liquor of the title and his origins, the nameless "Caribbean island" of his story could hardly be any other than his own.) "If someone had told them that, in any case, Canadians, so unlike the people back home, were basically cold and unfriendly. If only his folks knew how lonely and scared he was," bemoans his rum-punched, transplanted protagonist.

"Home," to quote Kittian-born writer Caryl Phillips, "is where one feels a welcome." Because Foster doesn't feel this in Canada probably has less to do with a people or place than with the plight of the immigrant. Anywhere other than where he (or she) was born and raised will always seem a little cold. Such is the reality of moving from the familiar to the foreign.

It has been said that "Canada is a state of mind." Possibly no one knows this better than blacks in Canada. Their literature has been an attempt to imagine themselves onto a cold, foreign landscape known as the Canadian psyche. In reading Eyeing the North Star, you realize how much these writers have brought with them from their countries of origin and contributed to this landscape's greater openness and warmth.

Back